Assassins Anonymous

Rob Hart's Assassins Anonymous (G.P. Putnam's Sons, June 2024) takes the hitman thriller and hands it a recovery program. Mark was the Pale Horse, the most feared killer-for-hire alive, until he decided the work had turned him into a monster. He quit, and he joined a twelve-step group for people who used to do exactly what he did — an anonymous room of former assassins holding one another to the promise not to go back.

Days before Mark collects his one-year chip, an unknown assailant attacks him. What follows is a chase across three continents, from New York to Singapore to London, in which Mark has to identify the person hunting him while refusing the only skill set he has ever been good at. The constraint is the engine of the book: every set piece is a fight he has to win without a kill, and every clue costs him more than it would have when he was still the Pale Horse.

Underneath the high-octane sequences and the dark comedy — Kirkus called it "bombastic whiz-bang fun", S.A. Cosby "suspenseful, sentimental and ultimately redemptive" — the novel is asking whether a person can genuinely change, and whether changing is the same thing as being forgiven. A USA Today bestseller and the first book of the Assassins Anonymous sequence.